Learn about Global Picklists with Vladimir Gerasimov

This week on the podcast we are speaking to newly minted product manager Vladimir Gerasimov about Global picklists and some of the exciting things we can expect in 2017.

A former software engineer at Microsoft and Salesforce engineer, Vlad is now the product manager of Global picklists at Salesforce. He understands the ubiquity of picklists at Salesforce, and as a new product manager, he’s looking forward to using community feedback to create the best possible solutions for admins.

More about Vlad’s session: Join us as Vlad gives us an inside look into the development of Global picklists and how his team is working to help people with the transition and merge process. We’ll also walk through picklist best practices, learn about the benefits of Restrictive picklists and hear about how Vlad’s team are using community idea exchange points to create some of the exciting updates that are set to roll out for Spring 2017.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Vladimir Gerasimov.

It takes a village.

Over 45,000 idea exchange points went into the creation of Global picklists. As Vladimir shares, “it’s amazing how you can get feedback from the community on what they want and incorporate it into your own map.”

“In every state, we have a great community of administrators and developers. As a product manager my goal is to reach out to them when I need their feedback,” says Vladimir.

Merging into the future.

Global picklists allow you to use one value set across multiple fields. This is obviously an incredibly valuable feature for new Salesforce users, but what if you’re a seasoned admin and you already have picklists in your org? Vlad and his team are currently working on solutions for people who want to transition and merge those picklists into Global picklists.

“We understand there’s a high-demand for this and we’re trying to solve it by providing the best possible solutions to administrator’s problems,” Vladimir says. This means working on ways to merge picklists and provide some level of automation for customers.

Manage your values more efficiently with Restrictive picklists.

We’ve all downloaded a .CSV file only to realize it contains outdated values. “Restrictive picklists (which are rolling out alongside Global picklists) prohibit you from doing that. You cannot have a value in your records that does not exist on the picklist itself,” says Vladimir.

As he points out, with Restrictive picklists, the performance of a page will no longer be affected by inactive values. “Whether it’s a regular or Global picklist, you’ll now be able to see a list of inactive values,” shares Vladimir.

Exciting news for 2017.

Some of the exciting features to roll out this Spring include improvements for record types and picklist integration. As Vlad shares, “this is also coming from the idea exchange. Soon you’ll be able to add a picklist value to use for full integration purposes between external applications and Salesforce.”

For more insights, make sure to follow Vladimir on Twitter (@vladimge).

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